On August 1st, 2019, New Hampshire Governor Sununu signed SB 279: relative to access to fertility care into law. The law, which can be found at RSA 417-G, updates New Hampshire’s health insurance statute to expand coverage of infertility treatment to group insurance plans. This means that starting January 1st, 2020 when the bill takes effect, most employer-provided health insurance plans will be required to cover the diagnosis and treatment of fertility related conditions.
New Hampshire’s current surrogacy statute can be traced back to 2014, when Attorney Jim Bianco and the Avenues to Surrogacy team successfully secured the passage of SB 353. This law (RSA 168-B) gave New Hampshire some of the best and most modern surrogacy laws in the country. New Hampshire is now recognized as a national leader in surrogacy and our law serves as a model for other states as they work to update their own laws. This new law does not specifically apply to surrogacy, but rather to what is categorized as standard fertility preservation services. This includes the procurement and cryopreservation of embryos, eggs, sperm, and reproductive material, and must be determined not to be an experimental infertility procedure. Currently, the law applies only to employer-provided plans, not individual health insurance plans. Still, this measure will save residents of New Hampshire a significant amount of money and make IVF much more accessible. As the main architects of New Hampshire’s surrogacy statute, Attorney Jim Bianco and the Avenues to Surrogacy team views this new law as an important step forward for fertility policy in New Hampshire. While surrogacy coverage was not included in this bill, we would love to see this coverage included in a similar bill in the future. If you have specific questions about the new law, or would like to discuss how the Avenues to Surrogacy team can assist you, please give us a call at (603) 228-6712 or send us an email at [email protected]. Comments are closed.
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